Saturday, March 17, 2007

Dreams

I was thinking about sleep and dreams. I don’t think that I have a sleeping problem; it’s just that, I like nights, so peaceful and serene especially when you’re listening to James Taylor. (I got to have coffee. This is becoming a habit, whenever I feel I must continue with this thing I do, I got to have coffee--must be James Taylor’s guitar and voice that’s doing this to me.) I was thinking about dreams, not that dreams, but the kind of dreams where you have nightmares and fantasies. The kind of dreams that make you wet your bed, make you wake up tired, make you wake up feeling dehydrated; dreams that sometimes affects what you’re aura or mood would be the whole day. Dreams.

Maybe I do have a sleeping problem: I am a hyper-somniac insomniac. It runs in the family, we’re late sleepers…err…I mean we’re early sleepers…hmmm…

My daughter sleeps with me and my wife. And it’s really interesting to observe my daughter when she’s asleep. She talks, kicks, grinds her teeth, and sometimes she even throw punches at us, just kept hitting us with her fist as if she’s in a boxing match. So, I got into thinking about dreams. Childhood dreams are powerful. When I was a child, I remember my mother waking me up. And when I woke up I was crying; in fact I was weeping, because when she woke me up, I lost the toy car that I was playing with in my dream-- a toy truck that drives it self. I don’t know if it’s a remote controlled or a battery operated toy truck, I don’t know because I can’t even describe it to my mother. My mother was dumfounded because I was looking for a toy that she has never even seen and she can’t even afford if it existed at all. I was crying hard and I was throwing pillows at my mother and looking under the pillows and the blankets for the toy truck. I rolled the buli sleeping mat, crawled under the cot to search for it, but there was no toy truck that drives by it self there. I was so mad because I lost a magical toy.

Now I know better and looking at my daughter asleep, I know how powerful and how wonderful a child’s dream can be. No, I never wake her up even when she’s talking or fighting in her sleep; those dreams are precious. Who knows what adventures she’s maybe in?

I remember waking my daughter up for school. She stood up, as if magic, because ordinarily waking her up is struggle. She stood up and looked at me and smiled. She ate her breakfast without any pleadings and threats, took a bath and we walked to school and I can feel there’s something in her, something’s not right, or should I say there’s something wonderful that happened to her that morning. When I arrived home that day, I saw her watching High School Musical and she’s singing along with the movie. I know, yes, I know that that morning she dreamt High School Musical and I know that she played the lead role in her dream.

I remember my older brother telling a story of how he woke up in the middle of the night to urinate and how he looked at the bed and saw himself still lying on it. He told us that what he did was to lie down on the bed again to reunite himself with the thing that was lying on the bed. When my mother heard this story, she got into talking about how her family had stories of out of body travels and she also told of other stories that were meant to tell us that we have powers beyond any normal human being. Well, that’s my mother and whether that story was true or not is immaterial because my mother is my mother.

But let me tell you about a strange dream I had. This happened about two decades ago when I was still in my teens, I was staring at the ceiling trying to sleep. I was about to fall sleep when I felt that my bladder was full. So, I stood up. And here’s the strange part, when I stoop up, my head hit the ceiling. I was looking at the ceiling and wondering why it was in front of my eyes. I didn’t look down; I just closed my eyes and went to sleep. Out of body travel? Nah, indigestion is more like it. Or maybe…just maybe…too freaky even to consider. Mother’s stories…

Dream. I read one book written by a Filipino theosophist titled “Scientific Basis (or Proof) for the Existence of Soul” (I read the book a long time ago and I can’t even remember the author) and one of his argument as proof for the existence of the soul is dreams. Dreams prove that there’s someone in there; some one that never sleeps; some one that is constantly vigilant and wakes you up when its time to wake up, when your dreaming it’s that someone in there who’s active. I don’t know, but dogs dream too; maybe, dogs have souls too.